Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  *

  So like the king of the aforementioned stories, I have been calling out, on a rather regular basis, “Bring me a scribe from the double house of life!” to interpret the postfire dreams I am wrongly receiving, like poorly addressed mail. Return to Sender! I keep stamping on these nightly missives, to no avail. Are these gifts? Omens? Do I need to find their rightful owners? Will someone, eventually, come looking for them? Will they hold one of my children hostage, in a fleetingly interesting news story—another school shooting today in rural Northern California, attributed to the strange prophecies of a neurotic mother. News at eleven! As my powers to summon such divination are limited, I’ve resorted to my own textual analyses, and lie in a bed stacked with The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East on one side of me and The Oneirocriticon of Achmet on the other. At my feet is Fromm’s The Forgotten Language and beneath my head, delicate and small, Henri Bergson’s The World of Dreams. Because its title scares me, The Third Reich of Dreams lies beneath my bed, where I cannot see it. One night, I could not sleep knowing it lay beneath me, so I opened the window and threw it outside, where it landed in the driveway, mute and soggy by morning. In the year before the election, I dreamt for many nights that the SS had descended again, and at the election night “party” we held to watch the results come in, everyone’s surprise as the ticker ticked hard right surprised me. Half a dozen times I came across a virtually identical experience, writes Charlotte Beradt, who collected the dreams of the German citizenry in the early years of Hitler’s rise to power. I dreamt it was forbidden to dream, but I did it anyway. Beradt’s research includes the memorable story of a twenty-two-year-old girl who had a “delicately formed, almost Semitic nose dominating her face” and worried everyone would think her Jewish … thus her dreams became filled with noses and identity papers.”

  Of Freud, I think of my student, a psychology major, who said to me the other day, in my class on modernism: Freud? We don’t read that guy in psych nowadays. My other professor said he’s totally, like, not even relevant anymore.

  *

  And of course, that isn’t true. But Freud is, geologically speaking, newfangled. I want to know the real news, that of the millennia of his predecessors. The contemporary world, inextricable from psychoanalytic theory, offers a whole set of dream-related explanations; even Radiolab tells the story of the rats hooked up to cables that are hooked up to microphones run by wires. By day, the rats run mazes, and by night, they dream the rhythm of the maze they’ve run, like miniature poets, hearing meter in their sleep. If someone dreams that his own clothes were burned by fire, the misfortune will be destruction of those people symbolized by that article of clothing. That’s according to dream interpreters from India. But the Persians and Egyptians say, Fire bears the greatest interpretations, for it refers to gods. And if you dream, as I did, that your chariot has burned, your kingdom will be humbled. So the car I ran away from in the feet of a stranger that I woke to find myself inhabiting seemed to be in part a message of the misfortune of the people of Paradise, a kingdom that has, no doubt, been humbled. You are ascending into Paradise, the town sign read, before it burned up. It must be noted that the translator of The Oneirocriticon of Achmet, Steven M. Oberhelman, almost defensively tells the reader that “while the symbolic interpretations of Achmet may at times be humorous and entertaining, they can be valuable sources of information when subjected to contemporary psychoanalytic methods.” Both Achmet and Freud, he notes, thought that urine symbolized semen, and that money and feces were likely interwoven in the mind of sleep.

  *

  Cicero—ever the critical thinker!—advised the following: “Let us reject, therefore, this divination of dreams, as well as all other kinds. For, to speak truly, that superstition has extended itself through all nations, and has oppressed the intellectual energies of all men, and has betrayed them into endless imbecilities.” Elena Goldstein Werlin, an elementary schoolteacher who was greatly influenced by the Senoi dream studies, had her students share their dreams over a period of months in 1961. After this time, when Werlin published the work in a volume of dream studies, the editor noted that “the surest way to discourage children from sharing their dreams was to interpret them. … They seem to sense, if it ever occurs to them, that interpreting a dream is the least interesting thing that can be done with it.”

  A third such opinion was recently opined by my Jewish mother, distanced by millennia from Cicero and by time from our childhoods and by an atheism strong as kryptonite from our ancestors who believed in the Sefer Hasidim. When I told her I needed to understand why I was having other people’s dreams, she asked, somewhat exasperatedly, “Why are you worrying about this?” Without really waiting for my answer, she said, “So if the dreams are bad, just get up and drink some water and go back to sleep.”

  But the Talmud begs to differ. Dreams follow the mouth of the interpreter. A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened. It was reported that for centuries, there were twenty-four dream interpreters at any one time in Jerusalem, each one superbly qualified, each one offering a different opinion of the dream’s meaning.

  *

  The contemporary, real-life rats who are given two mazes in the experiments actually homogenize the mazes in their sleep lives, warp them, and then dream their frequencies as merged things, inextricable from one another, chasing the power-pellet bites of cheese like nibbly little Pac-Men. Robert Stringhold, the researcher who conducted the experiment, talks about this phenomenon in the mind, using the analogy of sticky notes. When we have a problem, something we are trying to figure out or solve during the day, the mind just “puts a sticky on it,” he says. Then, in our sleep, we collect these little stickies.

  DeepDream, the brainchild of a Google engineer, simulates a convoluted neural network (synapses of stickies, so to speak) to create a dreamlike, hallucinogenic, computerized dream experience originating in the computer. Images are fed into the network, modified, then fed back into the network, and so on. These computer hallucinations are surreal, beautiful, and terrifying. The terrifying part, for me, is not the images themselves; it is the idea that dreaming—which for many of us seems like an experience unique to living organisms—now too can be manufactured. Even the reportage offered about this phenomenon is personified; consider this depiction from Henry Wilkin of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Special Edition Blog on Artificial Intelligence: “The idea is to relieve tension between what the AI is given as input and what it might want to receive as input … an artificial neural network can often function well enough without complete confidence in its own answers or even really knowing what it is looking for in the image that is given. Real images always look at least somewhat strange or ambiguous to an AI, and distorting the image to forcibly reduce uncertainty from the AI’s point of view causes it to look strange to us. …” In one of DeepDream’s images of the sky, the caption reads: Here, the neural network is trained to recognize locations, and is most familiar with furniture and buildings. It has never seen the sky before, and so initially it tries to make sense of it in terms of familiar shapes. DeepDream does the rest.

  “Within each of us,” Jung said pithily, “there is another we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.” Emerson, somewhat less pithily, speaks of this double as well: “My dreams are not me, they are not Nature, or the Not-me; they are both. They have a double consciousness, at once sub- and ob-jective. We call the phantoms that rise, the creation of our fancy, but they act like mutineers, and fire on their commander; showing that every act, every thought, every cause is bipolar, and in the act is contained the counteraction. If I strike, I am struck; if I chase, I am pursued. … Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, and arms us with terrible freedom.” Among the Andaman Islanders, who live off the coast of India and pay a great deal of attention to their dreams, the words for dream, double, and shadow are all from the very same root.
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  *

  The Mystique of Dreams, which hatches beneath my pillow, offers a cruel twist to the story of the Senoi. It turns out that Kilton Stewart, the quasi anthropologist who first studied the Senoi and inspired Garfield’s book on dreaming, was, well—he was a charismatic, dynamic, probably delightful, likely womanizing, embellisher of tales. “Going through the anthropological monographs published about these tribes, there is no note of Senoi dream sharing or control. This version of utopia—like utopias everywhere in fiction—is just that, fictional,” writes author G. William Domhoff, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He goes on to note, however, that no matter the motive, the mistakes, even the misrepresentations, each tells us something more about ourselves than it does about the dream lives of us or others.

  I do not close now on a critical note. I claim that both Stewart and the laboratory scientists had the virtue of stimulating new interest in dreams, and of leading to new ideas and findings thereby. After all, Stewart’s ideas about dream control seem to work for at least a few people who report fantastic, orgasmic sex dreams. … I earlier said “Senoi” dream theory is an allegory about the reaffirmation of American values through a search for an allegedly lost authenticity. The interest in Senoi dream theory that developed was a symbol of all that is best in the American character. … My book is in fact an allegory too. It is not only a story about Americans and their beliefs, but a cautionary tale about the difficulties of studying dreams in a systematic way. In that sense, it is a scientific allegory about a spiritual allegory.

  And so—since the eleventh grade, unbeknownst to me—I have been living inside an allegory, inside another allegory, a double dream wrapped in a backyard bamboo nest kissed over by the old man who fathered my children. All those morning trinkets I gave, the love notes, the daughters I taught to regard their dreams with nothing short of serious whimsy. Now we are each part of a larger cautionary tale, the butt, as it were, of a great American joke.

  *

  In the most frightening of my nightmares—and the last I shall burden you with—I am in Copenhagen. Quite literally, I have been transported there. It is one of the most visceral experiences I have ever had in a dream. I can feel rocks beneath my feet, which are in a pair of somewhat squeaky white leather sandals, of a style I have not seen before. If someone dreams that he put on sandals and went walking, he will undertake a journey, says The Oneirocriticon of Achmet. If the sandals are white, he will get a beautiful woman. I am a member of an audience in an outdoor amphitheater, and a couple—man and woman, dressed in somewhat Victorian attire—are about to be ritually burned alive, set on fire in all of their finery. This isn’t part of a show, it is not an act; there is a large pyre being built on the stage, and they are just behind it, not having yet been committed to the flames. We are all watching quietly. I am afraid of smelling their flesh, of hearing their screams. I try to get up out of the audience, and am told that I cannot be allowed to leave. Sparks from the pyre begin to pop into the evening air. The woman is then taken to the fire. She lets it lick her, proudly. Her face is turned toward the heavens. The man is timid, then terrified. He tries to back away, but the officials push him forward. He is crying terribly, yelling something that is not quite Danish but not quite gobbledygook; it sounds like a lost dialect of Saxony. I faint. When I come to, it is morning. A man is sweeping the ashes from the stage. He is my father. He tells me that I am very lucky I got to see the immolation; that few are invited into this ring. If someone dreams he was set on fire, he will be punished by a noble who is a feeder of the people, writes Achmet. He goes on to say, In general, it is not possible to find a single instance wherein a burning from fire is a good sign.

  *

  After the fire drank up the houses and barns and antiques and ponds and mailboxes and grandparents of Paradise, it raced down along the valley, lapping at the highways and the gas stations, licking the weeds and brush, swallowing manzanita and horse stables and stop signs until it came within two miles of our house. We packed our car full of a strange amalgamation of memories and vices, photographs and paintings and broadsides and books, enough booze to keep us steady for a few nights should the house burn, a laundry basket full of stuffed animals my grown children still knew by name.

  It was nearly midnight when we’d finished loading up, kerchiefs tied over our mouths and our Semitic noses, the darkness around us pocked by the lights of cars parked along our street—it was one of the last streets on the east side of town still open, and those with no homes to return to waited, their engines running—waiting for what, we wondered? To awaken, perhaps, to make a U-turn out of Lilac Lane and onto the highway that would take them to the bed they had been awakening in, morning after morning, in the dawns that had until now so predictably arrived as though waiting in an endless line at the edge of darkness. The Sefer Hasidim speaks of the Polis Dream, an unusual type of dream dreamt by an entire city at the same time. We were, it seemed, having this same dream, one in which we were all about to be swallowed, as though, in the words of James Hillman, we were transcending ourselves to truly become the psychic inhabitants of the underworld.

  The maps online showed the main roads closed from here to everywhere. We got in our car and rounded the bend until we were traveling on side streets toward the south end of town. Without moonlight or stars, the massive destruction was invisible from the dark culvert along the park where we live. When we rounded the bend and the trees that had enveloped us thinned out, we could see directly into the mouth of it—halo and furnace, wind and pain, light and hunger, a thing with such a will to live that it seemed to be dreaming all of us gone by morning.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  HEATHER ALTFELD is a poet and essayist. Her first book of poetry, The Disappearing Theatre, won the Poets at Work Book Prize. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Robert H. Winner Award and the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. “Obituary for Dead Languages,” her contribution to Conjunctions:70, Sanctuary: The Preservation Issue, was selected for The Best American Essays 2019.

  Longtime Conjunctions contributing editor MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE’s poems about stars are forthcoming from New Directions.

  LAYNIE BROWNE is a poet, prose writer, teacher, and editor. Her most recent collection of poems is In Garments Worn by Lindens (Tender Buttons Press). She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College.

  RITA CHANG-EPPIG’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Calyx, Kenyon Review Online, and The Paris Review. She was recently awarded a VSC/Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center.

  GILLIAN CONOLEY was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America in 2017. Her eighth collection, A Little More Red Sun on the Human, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books in fall 2019.

  KATHRYN DAVIS is the author of eight novels, most recently The Silk Road (Graywolf). Among other honors, she has won the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lannan Award for Fiction. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

  After her long poem Drafts, RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS has begun publishing a second multibook long poem, Traces, With Days, including Days and Works (Ahsahta Press), Around the Day in 80 Worlds (BlazeVOX), and the forthcoming Late Work, Traces, expected from Black Square Editions in 2019. Numbers, a book of collage-poems in color, was published by the Materialist Press.

  DANIELLE DUTTON is the author of Margaret the First (Catapult), SPRAWL (Wave Books), and Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press). She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of Dorothy, a publishing project.

  BRIAN EVENSON is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction. His latest book is Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press). He teaches at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.

  PETER GIZZI is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Archeophonics (fin
alist for the 2016 National Book Award), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011, and Threshold Songs (all Wesleyan University Press).

  SARAH GRIDLEY’s works include Weather Eye Open (University of California Press), Green Is the Orator (University of California Press), and Loom (Omnidawn). A new collection, Insofar, will be published by New Issues Press in spring 2020. She is a recipient of the 2018 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

  WILLIAM HICKS is the author of Stargazer’s Kitchen, a collection of poems from Synecdoche Press. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

  ERIKA HOWSARE’s most recent book is How Is Travel a Folded Form? (Saddle Road Press). Dancing Girl Press will publish her sixth chapbook, Several Circles, next winter. She lives in Virginia and posts photos of the ground at erikahowsare.com.

  ANN LAUTERBACH’s most recent book is Spell (Penguin). A Conjunctions contributing editor, she teaches at Bard College.

  RAVEN LEILANI’s work has appeared in Granta, New England Review, McSweeney’s, and Narrative Magazine. She is a recipient of the Matt Clark Editors’ Choice Prize in Fiction, was selected for Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below 30, and is an MFA candidate at New York University.

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the memoir In the Dream House (both Graywolf).

  CAROLE MASO is the author of ten books, including novels, poems in prose, essays, and a memoir. She is professor of literary arts at Brown University and recipient of the 2018 Berlin Prize.

  JAMES McCORKLE is the author of Evidences (Copper Canyon) and The Subtle Bodies, as well as the forthcoming In Time (both Etruscan Press). He lives in Geneva, New York, and teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.